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New submitter fplatten writes "I think this is all you need to see to know what legacy Steve Ballmer has left at Microsoft, where its IE browser market share has collapsed from a high of 86% in 2002 to just 9% now. I guess this is just another in a long list of tech companies that failed to maintain its dominant market share. Also, IE may be the one product that never really deserved it, but just piggybacked on Windows, and users left in droves once decent (more secure) alternatives and standards became popular." Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.

Congrats for feeling that way. I wish more of us had such a conscience.

Consider leaving a decent savings account along with the kids... if something happens to you, you have left a rainy day account to take care of your obligations.

I am hard pressed to trust anyone to pay my bills after my interment. I learned my lesson after years of dutifully paying for dental "insurance", month after month dutifully enclosing my check for "coverage", only to have it explained to me in the dentist's office when an e

I can't wait for transporter technology to be perfected. When I want to yell at somebody, I can "here" them, give them a piece of my mind, and then "away" them. Preferably someplace far from where they started.

You can do some due diligence and make sure you use a reputable company. This tends to be harder for things like homeowner's insurance than for term life insurance, which is pretty darned straightforward.

As much as I loathe Internet Explorer, this sort of response is unproductive. A lot of people are forced to use Internet Explorer who are neither idiots nor prey on them. Public access computers in libraries, computers in businesses and non-profits that have limited IT resources, and schools in lower income areas are also large users of Internet Explorer.

Measuring browser use nowadays is like measuring hairstyles. Many people don't browse to more than 3 or 4 sites or use different browsers at the same time. I'm surprised it's still at 25% with all the mobile browsing using Chrome or Safari.

I keep the stats on 12 state government websites. As sad as it may be, the lowest I've ever seen IE (taken as a whole) dip was 55%. And, for the record every site is tested and compliant on a multitude of browsers and not a single one recommends IE. We're getting there, but we're not at single digits yet.

As a government body, of course, they'll also be skewed. There's probably, for example, loads of poor bastards forced to use IE6 or whatever and who are not allowed to installer their own choice of browser for security reasons (don't laugh!).

Yes. Don't trust one website's stats. Always look at your own stats before deciding you can afford to not support a particular browser. Of course, you should always use progressive enhancement, so that even if people do insist on using ancient browsers, they should still be able to get the basic content. (It's a pity more people don't take the view, but considering the web was intended to be a universal, regardless of machine or software, medium, it's the view that is more inline with the intention of the web.)

I just popped up our site's stats We have had about 31,000 visits this month (according to awstats). IE comes in at 23%. The winner is Safari at 26.1%, so that tells use there are a helluva lot of iPhones out there. Firefox and Mozilla come in at 17.3% and 10%. Chrome comes in at 16.1%.

What it tells me, most of all, is that smart devices are becoming the dominant surfing platforms, and that not just IE, but Windows in general in slipping down the list.

Many company have internal applications that require IE. Fro example, my employer and a lot of other companies I know of rely on a web-based "project time and resource reporting" system that only supports IE (ver 6 or newer) and uses several methods to get around user agent header spoofing. It is the only reason I still use IE.

Probably very few people are visiting W3Schools from their corporate PCs, so their statistics won't include those installations. On the other hand, if people who use EI at work are us

"Microsoft to abandon Windows Phone"http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org](As an aside, the above story was submitted by the zealot megalomaniac symbolset).

Milking views by trolling only works for so long.

Thanks to zealot posters like bmo, symbolset, Zero__Kelvin, LordLimeCat, Jeremiah Cornelius, UnknowingFool, rtfa-troll, binarylarry, MightyMartian, drinkypoo, pieroxy for karmawhoring the groupthink and slowly ruining the site by spewing lame shill accusations. Oh and thanks to moderators for marking them insightful and modding down any posts that go against the groupthink.

When the beta lands and is the default without a way to go back to the old layout is the day I remove Slashdot from my bookmarks and unfollow on twitter.

You might be surprised. I seem to recall that they revealed the breakdown a few years back, and the IE traffic was much higher than you'd expect, simply because of interest from the typical, rank-and-file Windows variety of users who were looking for a change. I'll admit that I could be misremembering, however.

keep in mind windows 8 live tiles are all front ended with internet explorer. so they are anticipating higher ie traffic to sites that windows preloads so they can sound like they are doing something to compete with open source browsers...

keep in mind windows 8 live tiles are all front ended with internet explorer. so they are anticipating higher ie traffic to sites that windows preloads so they can sound like they are doing something to compete with open source browsers...

Considering the acceptance and use of Windows 8 (or 8.1) it's not something I'd call "reassuring", though Windows 9 will likely fare better.

All of MS's nice profitable products are still pretty tightly coupled with Windows. They could and probably should change that, but I'm not holding my breath. Until they do, it's pretty important that they sell a version of Windows that people actually like on the traditional/corporate desktop. Today Win7 is that version (and I'm a fan of it), but if they stop selling Windows 7 when Windows 9 comes out, well, Windows 9 had better be well received.

Firefox was built on Netscape so given the equally terrible experience of developing for Netscape back in the IE6 days I would be surprised if you didnt hate Firefox as well. Both Netscape and IE were terrible to develop for with their proprietary non-standard extensions, Netscape just had the decency to die and be reborn under a different name to make people forget its horrible legacy, IE should have died and been resurrected under a different name around IE10 when Microsoft finally changed tact and brought standards compliance to the forefront.

Contrary to Steve Jobs' comments the Internet Explorer of those days was *not* a very good browser, but >=IE10 is pretty decent.

One difference is that Netscape's "proprietary" extensions included stuff SSL, cookies, and javascript. They created a lot of what the web is all about, and were successful enough to scare microsoft into retaliation for having a better idea, which led to the anti-trust suit. Netscape didn't so much die, as was stabbed in the back by a wannabe.
IE10 might be good somewhere, but it sucks out loud on android, osx, ios and Linux (my preferred platforms). At best, its a niche product.

Your description of Netscape being "backstabbed" appears to conveniently forget that Netscape didn't ship anything useful for for FIVE YEARS. As stated by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Communicator_.28versions_4.0.E2.80.934.8.29):Netscape released the final version of Netscape Communicator [4.x] in June 1997.Netscape 6 was not yet ready for release and it flopped badlyNetscape 7.0 (based on Mozilla 1.0.1) was released in August 2002

lol, why would i hate firefox, it's the first browser that actually made MS stop pissing in their users' mouths and work on IE. you should fucking LOVE firefox, cause otherwise it's possible you'd be still using IE 6 right now.

Results start on page 4. ie10 doesn't blow away everybody else, but it's middle of the pack on most metrics and best or near best on some metrics. notably, there's no consistent winner across the board, it's not like any one browser is the king.

I'm with you. I don't like this trend towards "streamlining" everything, and I don't like IE10. Give me menus, status bars attached to the windows frame, etc. I have a big multi-monitor setup, I can handle it.

Unfortunately, at work, I have to use three different browsers: Chrome, IE, and Firefox, in order to be able to use all the sites I need to use. A single browser cannot run all the sites correctly. We've come full circle to the bad old days! At home, I just use IceWeasel and don't go to sites that don'

I don't know that an insurance co.'s site would be a good example here.

I have several sites I have to access that I cannot use anything but IE to visit them and do my business.

I think it would depend on the ins. co. correctly implementing standards to be a valid source of data for this discussion.

IMHO, all of the browser stats are biased in some way.Too many of the stats come from niche or specialized websites.I would think somewhere like google search to be a better place to gather stats for this.

Yes, but remember "Developers, Developers, Developers!". If the developers start abandoning IE, then your platform will no longer have the best experience and further encouage users to move to others, like Firefox/Chrome.

This is simply saying that most developers use something besides IE for their day-to-day browsing activities (and/or help lookup). This does not say anything about the browser mix that they have to (a) design for, or (b) test with. This is like looking at the White House and saying that the Congress must not have any Republicans.

It is the best data set to make Microsoft look bad- which is the point here.

And the real irony is that as of IE 11.0, it's actually a pretty solid browser. It's stable, fast, has a decent integrated web tool set and implements everything that is important (WebGL, HTML5, Offline, etc. etc.) Meanwhile, Chrome is slowly turning into a crashy, buggy piece of shit. Sigh.

The more accurate summary maybe that that most people who have a choice and know better do not use IE. This has always been the case since the internet began. IE has never been a decent or secure browser. It was an ok application front end, ane most people used it because there was no choice, and why run two different browsers. To this day I have websites written in legacy code that only run in IE.
TO be honest, for a few years, maybe 1997-2000, there were a few, mostly intranet, bussiness cases that did justify the use of the MS Internet. Mostly it was just laziness, which we are still paying for,
So yes, in the wide world IE may still have a majority, or a least be the largest minority in the web browser use. The web browser war, though it over, and the MS IE strategy has lost.

The current IE version isn't really relevant, because lots of people don't use that. For instance, here on my work computer, I'm using IE8 on Win7. It's not like I have any choice in the matter. Luckily, for browsing non-intranet sites, the company lets me install Firefox (version 26 currently). There's still lots of companies chugging along with IE6. And there's pretty much zero companies that have moved to Win8, so if the latest IE version only works on that (I don't know if it's available on Win7 or

It is, but you have to make sure that you have the latest SP1. If you installed a pirated Windows 7 or for any reason are unable to upgrade to SP1, then you're stuck w/ IE9. To go to IE10 or 11, you have to have the SP1 update

I believe this. I myself use all 3 browsers for different sites, but most people I know seem to prefer Chrome to IE. Contrast that w/ the Netscape days, where simply bundling IE was enough to toss Netscape out of business.

Is it? If they have to use legacy applications, then they have to use IE (usu. 6) to run those. However, these days, luckily lots of companies also allow other browsers to be installed, usually Firefox and/or Chrome, because IE sucks so bad for browsing regular (non-intranet) websites. Also, IE doesn't allow multiple versions of itself to be installed, so if your crappy internal time-reporting app or whatever only works in IE6 (or 8 or whatever), then you can't install a later version for viewing other w

Yea I was surprised to see a canvas-heavy app I'm writing is actually running faster in IE11 than in Chrome. My worldview was shattered and I was left despondent, my only choice - to sadly pick up the pieces and cut myself with them. These are my last words, my dying hope - that others will see my plight and be warned.

Yea I was surprised to see a canvas-heavy app I'm writing is actually running faster in IE11 than in Chrome. My worldview was shattered and I was left despondent, my only choice - to sadly pick up the pieces and cut myself with them. These are my last words, my dying hope - that others will see my plight and be warned.

Be cheerful even if you hate IE. The more we can get corps to upgrade the more we can just write to standards. Starting with IE 9 MS really did try to say we are sorry and make up for it. IE 9 compared to Firefox 4 was a better browser but lacked a few things. A different world than IE 8 - 6.

IE 10 can crash but made it modern. IE 11 finally uses edge javascript but unfortunately it breaks many intranet corporate sites which rely on ancient non standard behavior and even public ones like Monster.com which us

He joined in January 2000 when according to that link, the stock was at 48.94. Today the stock is at 36.50. Managing a -25% return over 14 years is not a good thing.

Did the stock split between 1/2000 and today? Did it pay dividends between those dates? Did you count either of those against your figures our just figure out that 36.50 was around 25% less than 48.94?

No he isn't. Microsoft's own calculator ( http://www.microsoft.com/inves... [microsoft.com] ) says that if you invested in MS stock on 1/1/2000 and reinvested all dividends back into them then you've managed a -14.71% return (ignoring inflation).

If you had waited until 1/1/2001 on the other hand you would have managed a 129.18% return (again ignoring inflation).

Of course I'm sure that has nothing to with the dot.com boom and bust or anything...

The statistics are "collected from W3Schools' log-files..." So an English-language site for people interested in web development is now considered an accurate proxy for browser usage? I think not. Predictably, the results are way out of line with, well, pretty much everyone:

The statistics are "collected from W3Schools' log-files..." So an English-language site for people interested in standards compliant web development is now considered an accurate proxy for browser usage? I think not. Predictably, the results are way out of line with, well, pretty much everyone:

FTFY- We all know anyone who does dev in IE isn't concerned with standards compliance.

15% of my customer base uses IE6 or IE7.
not just IE but superbad IE... of course we are business oriented software, which for some reason explains it all... corporate organizations are insanely, dangerously slow at upgrading.
Sometimes our site is run on cash registers and other ancient POS systems... but our "cloud" solution is accessed by IE more than any other browser, and IE6/7 more often than you could possibly imagine.... and it is no simple matter of forcing the customer to upgrade... what are they going to do, re-flash Windows CE and somehow get a decent browser to run on 256 meg of memory?

It is actually less shocking (though still really annoying) that people still use IE6 when you realize how much "modern" stuff you can still do on it. Almost everything in jQuery works, so even fancy active ajax pages are fine, as long as you account for the lack of JSON.stringify and JSON.parse and don't try to use a decent CSS layoyt.

a bajillion mobile devices and home computers that don't make anybody any real money run the latest stuff, but a tiny and extremely profitable segment of the userbase are Microsoft for life, and often, some old and horribly dangerous incarnation of Microsoft...

It's a vicious circle. At my former employer we were on IE6 because several of our critical Web applications only worked correctly with it. And since we were locked into IE6, any new Web applications had to work with it as well which removed any pressure to update. The only way we'd've gotten resources allocated to update those few ancient Web apps would have been if some other business-critical Web app had abandoned IE6 support entirely and said "IE 8 or later or we don't work". Which they won't do because they don't want to risk losing their IE6 user base. And round and round it goes, like a pair of orbiting black holes.

Worse if these customers are vendors, suppliers, or retailers, then they also demand each B2B company to also use IE 6.

So now the trucking company has IE 6, supplier has IE 6, retailer has IE 6, and trucking company has IE 6. Now they have their other customers but ooops now these 4 or 5 companies that use IE 6 tell the others to use IE 6 etc.

The damn thing is a virus! Like herpes is spreads and even when they upgrade and appear to have the dinosuar behind it is still there if you peel deep within the skin

1) Those corporate org customers/clients of yours probably have intranet apps that were designed around IE6 and break horribly in any other browser, and it is "too expensive" to re-do them for either a neutral platform, updated version of IE, etc.

2) Those same corporate org customers/clients of yours probably have an IT department that won't allow them to install other browsers to use when not using the aforementioned IE6 based apps

Now is the time to put the javascript from IE6countdown to remind users to upgrade. Modify it so IE 7 displays the same message. Since XP is going EOL it is something their IT departments should be working on anyway.

Let's see... Microsoft has only themselves to blame for this problem. They stopped supporting their non-standard features in newer versions, and made the stupid decision to not make newer versions of IE to try to "nudge their OS choices". In mixed OS environments, even if only temporary, the version of IE used ends up being the least common denominator. So, in a shop that ran a mix of XP, W2K, and 98, you standardized on IE6. Currently, if you're running a mix of XP and Win7, you're likely using IE8...

Obviously, this plan backfired on Microsoft. What other browser vendor supports 6 major versions of their browser? Oh, and if you thought that IE6 would fall off with the demise of WinXP, think again--it came with Windows Server 2003, so IE6 is already supported until 7/2015, just shy of 14 years after it was introduced!!! (And that's not assuming that XP doesn't continue to get support fixes beyond 4/2014 or even 7/2015...)

What I do mind is old IE and wanting that to go down to single digit marketshare.

Why can't we all have nice websites that look as good as your apps on your phone? IE the fact that users never ever upgrade!

Shit IE 8 is 5 years old now and we can't have HTML 5 outside our crappy tiny phones. Inexecusable. Let this dinosaur die and I hope the intranet developers die a horrible death who still do not know what ECMA script is and think Jscript is javascript.... and that statistic is BS. If IE 9 and early hits single digit it is time we stop making business sites that work in HTML 4 and CSS 2. They wont upgrade until websites stop working and websites wont stop working until users upgrade. Now it is 2014 and we are living 10 years in the past due to the same old BS.

g.statcounter.com make sure you select North America as China is such a HUUGGEE outliner with IE 6 compared to every other country. However it produces results that conflict with everyone else such as Chrome #1 browser, while IE 8 is the worlds most popular browser according to netmarketshare and others.

Google Analytics does this. Looking at my veggie gardening site - which I assume means home users, mostly - 98% of IE users are version 9 or above. So that's good news!

Of course my site mostly sticks to standards, so it was never designed to work well with IE 6 (and only marginally w/ IE 7). I've gotten complaints about that in the past... so perhaps those users just stopped coming.

Humm, as a developer I feel a bit idiot because I never really ask myself the question... and always think it was the same thing. After a quick look it seems I'm right, both compile and run the same way... it's different name for specific version of ECMA Script.
http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]

IT guy here. I'm with you. I hate old IE. I wish it would die a horrible death. Having said that, I think new IE is quite nice, to the point that the only thing preventing me from switching is a few Firefox behaviors that are technically deprecated.
However, I must pipe up regarding old IE usage on corporate networks. In my experience, the thing preventing upgrading IE is legacy enterprise software, as you accurately pointed out. Sadly, these programs often were only purchased because they were the cheapes

A biased submitter found a statistic to support their claim that IE is no longer relevant. I agree IE may be losing relevance but the w3school log files only show that people who want to learn how to write a webpage from w3school are likely to use Chrome. I suspect if I looked at the log at Microsoft's developer network I would come to the conclusion of IE being preferred by developers, and if I went to Apple's developer site it would show that Safari being preferred by developers.

The other red flag being that the statistics are presented as percentages with no absolute numbers given. This could be a site serving a very small demographic with very low volume. In fact the site discloses some of these caveats in the "Statistics can be misleading" section of that page.

I am sure at w3schools they're dealing primarily with devs, who do in fact prefer another browser over IE. but on my site of 3000 unique visitors per month, I'm seeing... what others are seeing at sites other than w3schools.

On my other site with a seeding of 1500 unique users, IE sits at 29.5%, Chrome at 33.7%, Firefox at 17.9%, everything else, who cares.. It makes me wonder what more Windows orientated sites, mainsteam news sites get - Yahoo, Rage3D, Tomshardware, etc. These are the sites I think most of the IE users are on (my site here gets most of it's users from the AMD graphics card camp, doing 29.5% IE).

Nearly every time I do cross platform testing, it is Firefox-yup, Safari-yup, Chrome-yup, IE-NOPE. I don't remember the last time I made a browser conditional if statement for the first three but nearly always I find that with IE I have to resort to the awfulness that is browser conditional javascript.

Now with IE10 things are pretty good but due to the huge prevalence of 7, 8, 9 (and in some corporations, even 6). But this has been years of being smashed in the teeth by IE, So I am not glad to see it go away because of any problems with IE10/11 but like the wall street bankers past actions, MS had it coming.

Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.

Microsoft's stock is 20.89% higher than it was on this date in 2002. That is an average yearly increase of 1.74%. US Savings Bonds had a greater return over that time period! So, if their shareholders aren't upset, they should be.

They sunk costs into IE as a way to maintain their monopoly in the 1990s. They were really scared shitless that a browser could become the OS for all intents and purposes and then people would move away from a microsofty world.

The problem is that for small businesses that already occurred. I know people that use quickbooks online and other such services and their OSes don't matter for shit.

And almost nobody in the west will dare to make IE only websites anymo

I could make a site that doesn't work on Browser X. People will visit it once with Browser X, see it doesn't work and try it with Browser Y. The net result is that this site's logs will show Browser Y becoming insanely popular over time when the reality could be that people only use Browser Y for my site and Browser X for every other site. Probably not the case here, but there's stranger ways to unintentionally skew data.

Following the link referenced we get: "From the statistics below (collected from W3Schools' log-files over a period of ten years), you can read the long term trends of browser usage."

So this data set really shows only the behavior of access to the w3schools.com site. Don't make inferences across the general population.

I also note that they don't say WHAT drives that percentage? Is it based on IP addresses or raw page views? Could it be that Chrome users have to look up how to do basic web crap more often? Maybe IE dropped because those on Windows platforms are using Visual Stdio with its own built-in help. There is no way you can make any educated inferences from this data. This is another stunt to get Slashdot pageviews.